One of 25 installments in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite fantasy novels from the Thirties (1934–43). Enjoy!

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME | H.P. LOVECRAFT | 1936

Most stories by H.P. Lovecraft work by slow reveal, inexorably circling around a hideous and often sanity-blasting revelation that pops out at the very last moment to provoke a gargle of shock in the stricken reader. Without doubt, The Shadow Out of Time, one of his last works, and longer than most, has just such an ending. Yet what’s fascinating about the story is how it doesn’t quite have the same beginning or middle. On the surface, yes, of course it does: a middle-aged professor has a strange fit and passes five years with an utterly transformed personality, only to return to his senses beset by disturbing fragments of vivid, nauseating dreams implying that his consciousness passed those years transported not only in another body, but also an impossibly distant time. After much research and many loathsome tomes, the professor is drawn to strange ruins in the Australian desert…

But we sense what’s coming from the first pages, and we know pretty much exactly what’s coming from about halfway through a 30,000-word manuscript. It’s possible that Lovecraft couldn’t be bothered to disguise his plot’s destination, or didn’t care anymore, or was in fact clumsy — but this feels wrong, because the story remains unsettling and effective, just in a different way. A more interesting explanation is Lovecraft being taken with the bald scope of his vision — a fatalistic nihilism spanning eons — and eschewing story mechanics devoting himself to its full description. The Shadow Out of Time finds him deep in his own oeuvre, indulging in wry self-commentary, embroidering his own conventions, cannibalizing some references, expanding others. While there’s a pro forma element to the suspense (honestly, there almost no suspense), there is a luxuriant focus on the details of denial and delay and optimism that occupy us on the way — all the dominos of complacent civilization that must be toppled by the eldritch truths of a pitiless universe. In this last, late story the time spent on the journey, with its portrait of ‘sanity’ and ‘hope’, seems like Lovecraft’s own attempt to reconcile with a normal world in which he remained hopelessly at odds. Perhaps uncharacteristically, The Shadow Out of Time isn’t acrid or scornful — if anything, the portrait of blinkered human life on the Miskatonic is wistful and sad.

About the Author

Gordon Dahlquist is a novelist and playwright. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in Brooklyn. His play Tomorrow Come Today won the James Tait Black Prize for drama. His most recent novel is The Different Girl.